Apr. 23rd, 2016

Apr. 23rd, 2016

I miss having pottery class, but it was nice to be able to accommodate my broken sleep last night by staying in bed rather longer than I'd have been able to if there were class today. (Cats have pointy toes, so I was awakened rudely about 4am.) My plan is to paint some of the bisqueware I brought home, and to make some new newsprint stencils for when I can work with my greenware again.

The broken sleep was not at all the fault of the Rocky Horror Chiptune Show, which was at 10pm rather than midnight and proved easy to bus to and from. It was also extremely strange. The regular movie of Rocky Horror had been edited to include chiptune versions of the songs, so more than half the callbacks didn't apply and I was too confused to dance to the Time Warp. (Also some lines are different here from when/where I've been to shows before, so I was trying to learn them from a ragged and incomplete version. Failed. And disapproved strongly of the Prince stuff some jerks tried to add in.) There was also an awkward framing story of dudebros playing a Rocky Horror video game, which I could have done without, and they leaned too heavily on Pokemon parodies when I would have liked to see more retro gaming variety.

The most amazing part, though, was that the cast was dressed as NES characters. Frank-N-Furter as Mega Man is kinda perfect to be honest, and the person playing him was great. Brad and Janet were Mario and Peach, and for some reason Riff Raff and Magenta had really good Link and Zelda costumes. The conceptual triumph, though, was Dr. Scott as Pong: LED paddles mounted on some kind of armature, as far as I could tell, and a glowing ball moved back and forth between them by the actor.

Some of the songs and animations were great adaptations, some seemed a bit half-assed, and some were merely confusing. There's a playlist of the whole thing on Youtube, actually, so you can see what I mean. All of them would have benefited from subtitles, since an audience populous and deeply steeped in Rocky enough to completely follow along is incredibly unlikely. I'm pretty familiar with the show, though I haven't gone regularly in years, and I was WTFing an awful lot. Better execution would have been great, though I get that it's hard in a multi-person project like this. (Looking forward to this problem for my latest dragon game cat-herding project now. Yay.) More accessibility, though, could be imposed on the thing afterward by adding in subtitles and balancing the soundtrack better so the parallels could be heard.